Missing Confederate Graves at Hopkinsville's Riverside Cemetery

A chance to set the record straight

I've written several times in the past about Camp Alcorn in Hopkinsville, KY, where about 300 Confederate soldiers died of disease and exposure during the Civil War. If this topic interests you, you'll enjoy the well-researched article at the link below:

  Confederate Tragedy at Hopkinsville and the Missing Graves

This link leads to a Rootsweb military page about the Camp Alcorn burials in a potters field in Riverside Cemetery, and the later re-burial of  "unknown" Confederate soldiers.

The author of this paper is William Meacham, Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He lives in Hong Kong, as you might imagine, but he has family ties to Christian County, KY.  Mr. Meacham's research indicates that 72 or more Confederate soldiers are still lying in unmarked graves in Riverside Cemetery.

I am a "damyankee" transplanted in Christian County about 20 years ago, and most (though not all!) of my ancestors fought on the Union side of the Civil War. But, despite my own leanings, I think that we in Christian County should locate and mark the graves of these Confederate soldiers if we can. It is the decent thing to do, especially considering the mishandling of important records and the mistakes made with the Camp Alcorn graves in the past.